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“Around June of last year, I was doing a Color Series where I created a landscape each in each color of the color wheel (plus gray), and found myself getting stuck on the green one,” Richards explained the inspiration behind the aerial-view embroidery.
“As I was thinking of ideas, I was looking at the fields opposite my bedroom window and wondered how a top-down view of fields and trees would work out for it! I did the first piece and fell right in love—I already had an interest in aerial views and I felt like I’d found my thing in this!”
Needless to say, embroidery requires patience, diligence, and, of course, time. And even though it varies in Richards’ case depending on the project, it still requires quite a bit of work to get a single creation done, as she explains:
“It varies a lot by side… I just yesterday finished an intricate 6-inch (approx. 15 centimeter) piece that took about 50 hours to make, while a simple one of that size would be as little as a quarter of that time! Most pieces are between 6 and 25 hours, though.”
Richards reckons she’s done over 200 realistic and 3D-looking landscapes at this point—you can do the math how many hours that took. And this is besides all of the other non-aerial pictures that she has embroidered over the years!
“I like to make my pieces as bright as possible, so I like to use strong, rich colors even if in a real life landscape, they’d be dull. I like to think of my art style as an optimistic one!” elaborated Richards.
But, like any masterpiece, it doesn’t come easy. Art of such caliber comes with its own challenges, as Richards elaborates:
“I think I would consider the biggest challenge getting the depth and perspectives right—I like to make them as realistic as possible, which means the trees, bushes, flowers, animals, fields, and vehicles all need to be accurately sized against each other. For example, a tree can be a big, fluffy French knot, but the sheep next to it a tiny white speck—some details I add in are hardly visible in the photos!”
As for how Richards decides to do each particular embroidered image, she explains that it is actually based on intuition. She rarely starts any piece with a plan of what she’s going to add or what the end results will be. She adds a tree outline and everything else falls into place naturally.
Lastly, we asked Richards whether she has a favorite among the many aerial embroidering pieces she’s done. She had this to say:
“I completed a 16-inch (approx. 41 centimeter) piece (which took 120 hours!) a couple months ago, which I’m hugely proud of! As someone who, for the longest time, only did 3-inch landscapes, this was a huge thing for me and I’m so pleased with the result. Other than that one, my favorite is the first yellow-themed aerial I did around September last year—even though I’ve done so many since, there’s something about this one that always felt special to me.”
Be sure to check out Richards’ Instagram and Twitter for more spectacular embroidery and why not also give her Etsy store a visit? Bored Panda also featured her once before, so you can also go check out the other article here. But before you go, let us know what you thought of this in the comment section below!
